Hudson New York

The Nobel Peace Prize for President Barack Obama is aimed against America and American interests.  Little else needs to be said about it, in my opinion as a moderate Muslim. The Peace Prize was given to Obama to force him toward complete withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan , as well as to discourage him from serious action against the disgraceful politics of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters within the clerical order in Iran, including their atomic adventurism.  Obama may talk tough on the Iranian nuclear bomb, but it is doubtful he will act on his rhetoric.

The Nobel Peace Prize for Obama continues the tradition of European anti-American blackmail: “Nobel gestures” by self-righteous Scandinavians, who consider themselves the conscience of the world, and especially of Europe.

A Nobel lurch toward appeasement of totalitarians was first visible in 1962 when the Peace Prize was handed to Linus Pauling, an American scientist better known for his tireless pro-Soviet propaganda.  As with Obama’s Nobel, the accolade went to an American as a repudiation of American policy.  The Norwegian Nobel panel added an abominable element of moral equivalence to their treatment of Americans in 1973, when the Peace Prize was shared by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho.  The latter was a representative of the Vietnamese Communists, who, rather than honoring the Paris “peace accords” that were employed to justify the Prize, exploited the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Indochina to secure their own triumph, with catastrophic results for human rights.   Tho and his Communist colleagues, however, refused to participate in the Nobel charade, and Tho declined to accept the Peace Prize.   It has been suggested that Obama should do the same, which seems unlikely.

After that, choices for the Nobel Peace Prize became increasingly unsavory, although in the first half of the 20th century the Prize was frequently received by questionable figures from the failed predecessor of the United Nations, the League of Nations.  Peace Nobels have been been presented more recently to United Nations agencies with bad reputations for mishandling humanitarian crises. The UN High Commission for Refugees was the recipient in 1981.  UNHCR works to keep refugees in a dependent state.  Their director in Bosnia-Hercegovina during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Japanese functionary Yasushi Akashi, accused the Bosnians themselves of shelling Sarajevo and of enabling the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys by Serbian paramilitaries.  

UN Peacekeeping Forces were honored with the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize.  Their record has been negative in almost every country where they have appeared.  They administer dubious ceasefires.  They do not bring peace.   And they were hated during the Bosnian war for their adherence to “neutrality,” which, in practice, meant a refusal to prevent atrocities.

In 1992, the Peace Prize was conferred on Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan leftist leader, in an outstanding demonstration of Nordic heedlessness, disguised as altruism.   The award to Menchú was a multiple score for political correctness.  It served not only the aims of Columbus-bashers who fawned on her as a supposed representative of all indigenous Americans (while, against the protests of the radical left, the 500th anniversary of the explorer’s arrival in the New World was celebrated), but also those of highly-placed European meddlers in Latin American affairs. 

Rather than representing peace and reconciliation, Menchú stood for continued armed struggle and did not even accept non-violence as a means of protest.  Some media noted, delicately, with news of her Peace Prize, that she denied being an actual guerrilla, “but [was] uncritical of the [Guatemalan] rebels.”  As The New York Times put it, Menchú “endorsed insurrection… but says she never belonged to any of the country’s guerrilla groups.”  For the Norwegians, it seemed, promoting violence in a distant country of which they knew little was a consolation to themselves for the failure of the radical left in its promise of a happier, more just society in their own part of the world.   Norway attained stability and prosperity through social-democratic and free-market politics, and the discovery of offshore oil.  Norwegian extremist Marxists of the 1960s produced nothing useful for the country, but left an unfortunate legacy of nostalgia among its intellectuals for the red flag and the raised fist.  

Outrageous moral equivalence was back on the Nobel agenda two years, later, when the 1994 Peace Prize was shared by Yasser Arafat and two Israelis, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for signing the Oslo Accords.   As with Le Duc Tho, however, neither those Accords nor the Nobel medal stopped Arafat from supporting the “second intifada” in 2000.  The intrigues of Arafat did not gain a victory over Israel for his Fatah party comparable to that of the Vietnamese Communists, but neither did it occur to him to refuse the Peace Prize.  His peace pantomime allowed him and his followers to so grossly enrich themselves that, as noted by Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh and others, Arafat’s flagrant corruption drove Palestinians to support the radical Islamist Hamas movement.

The list of problematic Peace Prizes goes on.  In 2001 the UN was again commended by the Norwegians, along with its then-Secretary General, Kofi Annan - who represented an antidemocratic, military government in Ghana before the world body, and has been charged with obstructing UN soldiers from taking consequential action to halt the genocidal massacres in Rwanda.   Annan also presided over the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal which still has not been adequately investigated, but which saw the misappropriation of almost $50 billion.

The pattern of anti-American Nobels given to Americans was revived in 2002, when the Peace Prize went to Jimmy Carter, for his campaigning as a do-gooder, and again in 2007 by its presentation to Al Gore.  In both cases, the awardee was viewed by the Norwegians as an American who represented divergence from the main U.S. policies of the past 20 years.  The Norwegians seemed to celebrate Carter’s failures in Iran and Nicaragua, as well as his diplomacy with Israel and the Palestinians, which also had no genuinely positive effect.  In the case of Gore, since the U.S. would not officially endorse the global hysteria over climate change represented by the Kyoto Protocol, the Nobel for Peace went to an American politician who would unofficially do so.

The real nature of the Nobel Peace Prizes is ideological, and Obama’s Nobel is an expression of appreciation for him by America-haters.  The Norwegian patrons of the Prize are deaf to the demonstrations by the Iranians undermined in their opposition to Ahmadinejad by Obama, blind to the martyrdom of Muslims killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and silent about the prospect that, encouraged by Obama’s complacency, the Russia of Vladimir Putin will soon launch or sponsor another aggressive attack against the victims of its former Communist rulers and their allies, whether in Ukraine, Georgia, or the Balkans.   The Nobel Peace Prize has become a badge of shame.